My parents, like most, were loving caring parents who took a great deal of pride teaching, clothing, and, of course, feeding their children. My mother, who announced to my father that she was about to begin divorce proceedings against him on Mothers Day when I was either seven or eight, continued to take the same amount of pride in her tasks as a mother even as she started a new family with a new man. My father, stuck in a dead end job with a mortgage, and lawyer bills he didn't even want to think about, took pleasure in the one thing he had left: fatherhood.

Things weren't bad. Being in a single family home didn't change much except that I could be out all day so long as I made it home by or before the time he walked in the door. That was all he asked of me and that was all I allowed. It was a good arrangement, I thought. After a while I even began to think that all families had the same perks and found myself fairly disappointed until thirteen when the rest of my friends, save one, joined the ranks of the free. Poor sucker, I thought about Aaron. His mom was almost always home.

My father was never much of a cook. He admitted it. The man damn near took pride in the fact that toast, eggs, and bacon were all he was capable of. He didn't even attempt Ragu after a while, burning all but one of his previous attempts. He came home one day beaming with pride as he showed his kids the Microwave Cookbook he'd picked up at B. Dalton earlier that day while searching for the new Dick Francis or Robert B. Parker novel. Forever after that moment I had wished he'd found what he was originally looking for. Spencer had some charm and I had the television show for Cliff Notes on scenery when I read from his bookshelf. Dick Francis was always about horses. What the hell did I care about horses? Even if my dad had raised me as a life long Steve McQueen fan, I still never liked the westerns. As it was, because the store was either out of the novels or they just hadn't come in yet, for the next few years my siblings and I were treated to such deliacasesis as the "Fifteen Minute Lasagna" or, even worse, the "Beef Stroganoff." We wished he'd stuck with Hamburger Helper on the latter were he competent in the least on the range.

It was rare, but usually when it happened it was because he hated every one of those recipes as much as we did and that it was also payday, he would take us out to the local Italian Pizzeria where he would order a large pizza with everything on it, everything except anchovies that was. We'd tried anchovies once on a take out order and the pizza, almost whole, ended up in the trash bin outside because we couldn't stand the smell much less the taste of the repugnant pie. He would count the number of slices, always the same number but he'd count anyway, and allot a certain dividend to everyone. It was fair, even if he got three and the rest of us got two, but then he was much larger than we were and it beat home cooking. It wasn't until I was out on my own that I realized that the restaurant also served some quite extraordinary pasta dishes also, not that we would have been able to order them.

As said, my dad had talent with eggs, and that was about it. Much later, when I was cooking for myself, I figured that it was due to the fact that eggs have almost no guess work to them. When they're done, they're done. Dad had a tendency to overcook everything, which was fine with eggs because there is nothing worse than those that are runny. His specialty, and the first thing I ever learned how to cook, was his fried egg sandwich. It was his. He was very possessive about it like our dogs were with their single bones. He had one thing he could cook, and cook well, and it was his thank you. The method in which it was cooked was really unimportant because the ingredients spoke for themselves: two eggs, fried in bacon grease, topped with bacon, slices of sharp cheddar and Monterey Jack, mayonnaise, ketchup, and, when he felt like adding that extra special touch, a dab of cream cheese between the eggs. It was a monster, the kind of thing that left you stranded in a greasy sea of cholesterol and not a lifeboat in sight. He made them almost every Saturday between airings of golf on the Wide World of Sports.

Our salvation from the monotony of our father's deft hand in the kitchen was traded for a sameness of a different kind every other weekend at my mother's house during her court granted bi-monthly visitations. It didn't matter what she cooked so long as it wasn't eggs and it wasn't microwaved. On Friday nights, to start the weekend off with a fiesta mood, she made tacos and tostadas which were about as Mexican as I am, but had a crunchy texture with which I was not normally accustomed to and my mouth rejoiced. Saturday's, after a day long of watching all the movies Dad wouldn't let us watch and playing video games on the Nintendo Dad wouldn't let us own, we had a dinner of either Shepherd's Pie or her "patented" chicken casserole. It was like a last meal before execution, knowing that Sunday night we'd be back home and returning to the menu we knew oh-so-well.

It was almost funny, thinking about it, that my dad, coming home from work, would sometimes ask us what we wanted for dinner. The silence was usually deafening. What were we to choose? Not the fried egg sandwich because that would surely detract from our pleasure on Saturday and, god help us, not a microwaved dish. We'd rather not eat if that was the option and when asked, depending on our appetites, was sometimes the answer we gave. "Hey, you don't want to eat," he'd say to us. "Fine. Makes my life easier."

Had I not enrolled in a home economics class for one semester in middle school by some freak scheduling accident, I might have died of self-imposed starvation. As chance would have it, even these years later, it still proves to be the only class durring my tenure in the public education system that I continue to draw upon in any kind of manner. Of all the punk rock kids I knew, my patches were the ones most exquisitely sewn to my bags and jackets. It also improved our diets at home substantially. Before I started cooking, my siblings had never before had vegetables that didn't come out of can and because, when out, we could never order pasta, my lasagna may have been the only non-microwave version they'd ever had.

When I moved out on my own, after having lived with a girlfriend that cooked better than anyone I'd ever known, I was eating so well I almost forgot that I didn't own a microwave.